Frank R. James never seemed to stay in one place for very long. But as he drifted from the East Coast to the Midwest over the course of his adult life, trouble often followed, according to interviews and records from four states.
In New York, he was arrested at least nine times — mostly on low-level charges, but also on suspicion of committing arson and reckless endangerment. In New Jersey, he was charged with making terroristic threats after calling and threatening people at a former workplace.
And when he lived in Milwaukee, police records and interviews show, he was at odds with his neighbors in two locations, including at a rooming house that a former resident described as a regular stopover for people with mental health problems and convicted of sex offenses and other crimes.
This week, the police said, Mr. James, 62, returned to New York City and committed the worst attack on the subway system in decades, opening fire on a crowded N train in Brooklyn and wounding 10 people. On Wednesday, Mr. James was charged in Federal District Court with carrying out a terrorist attack on a mass transit system. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
Investigators are still trying to piece together a clear picture of Mr. James’s life, only patches of which are provided by public records. People who encountered him said he was a loner, long estranged from his family, who changed addresses often.
Although he was accused multiple times of threatening people close to him, there is no record of him ever acting on those threats. He also has not been convicted of a felony, which made it possible for him to purchase the semiautomatic handgun the police said he used in the subway shootings.
And though he claimed in online videos to have undergone mental health treatment in the Bronx decades ago, no public records have surfaced to suggest that he was ever admitted to a psychiatric center as a threat to himself or others.
The root of Mr. James’s troubles may trace to his early childhood. His mother died when he was five, according to a sister, Catherine James Robinson.
Mr. James’s cousin, Dwayne Waters, said that growing up, Mr. James had been a “really good guy” and that they had fished together on the weekends. But he added that Mr. James had “mental problems for a very long time.”
A neighbor, Paul Cannon, remembered “Frankie,” as he was known growing up, as having been quiet and aloof, rarely participating in stickball and other sports on the tree-lined streets of their neighborhood, just south of Crotona Park.
As an adult, Mr. Cannon became the president of a co-op building on the block where Mr. James’s father worked as a handyman. Mr. James, then in his late 20s, was still living with his father when an apartment became available in the building on the first floor. Mr. Cannon rented it to Mr. James.
But he had to evict his new tenant after Mr. James failed to pay almost a full year’s worth of rent. Apparently seeking retribution, Mr. James poured water over the concrete floor of the building’s lobby, Mr. Cannon said.
By the time he moved out, Mr. James had already had trouble with the law.
He was charged with arson in the Bronx in 1980 and went on to face minor charges in New York and New Jersey.
In the mid-1990s, Mr. James was charged with making terroristic threats after repeatedly calling his former workplace, Curtiss-Wright, an aviation technology company. A spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey said that Mr. James had “vowed some sort of violence over his termination” but did not offer further details.
He was found guilty of harassment, a lesser charge, sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to attend counseling at Bridgeway Behavioral Health Services, then based in Elizabeth, N.J., according to court records and the president of the organization, Cory Storch.
Mr. James completed Bridgeway’s vocational training program and went on to become an employee with the organization’s maintenance department. But he was ultimately fired after making threatening comments toward staff members, Mr. Storch said.
“He wasn’t making direct threats,” he said. “James is an intelligent person. But he was making very angry comments, with lots of expletives. Scary stuff.”
“We called the Elizabeth police because some of our people were really scared,” Mr. Storch said.
Mr. James appeared to resent mental health treatment: In several of the videos he posted to YouTube, he assailed the workers whom he said had treated him at a different organization, the South Bronx Mental Health Council, with racist insults.
Later, in 2007, Mr. James was convicted of disorderly conduct in Hoboken, N.J., and, in 2011, he was taken to court in Philadelphia over unpaid credit card debt. Details on the 2007 case in Hoboken were not immediately available from court documents.
After that, there was a period of relative silence. Though public records indicate that Mr. James spent time in Chicago, he does not appear to have been arrested there. Neither was he taken into custody in Milwaukee, where he lived in a rooming house on the city’s South Side.
It was a rough place. David Lorenz, who was a resident at the same time as Mr. James, said that it was a haven for people who were down on their luck, and “trying to keep their nose clean.” Mr. Lorenz said it was not unusual for the home to rent apartments to people who were recently released from prison or suffering from drug addiction or mental health problems.
According to his videos and public records, Mr. James lived in Milwaukee until March. After moving out of the rooming house, he rented an apartment nearby, where he again had trouble with his neighbors. Keilah Miller, who lived next to Mr. James, called him a “really weird neighbor” and said that he had confronted her aggressively after she mistakenly left her key in the lock.
Ms. Miller said Tuesday that she had not seen Mr. James since late March. By then, according to the authorities and to Mr. James’s own posts on social media, he was already on his way back east, where, as he put it in one video, “all my troubles started.”
Téa Kvetenadze, Michael LaForgia and Dan Simmons contributed reporting.
